


I Take My Secrets to the Grave

by sheepyshavings



Series: so she comes in like thunder [3]
Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Internalized Homophobia, now the plot begins to thicken, will add more tags as it updates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-24
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-11 00:30:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4413917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheepyshavings/pseuds/sheepyshavings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>The moment Angie gets back into her own room, heart pounding like a drum in her rib cage, she deadbolts the door and brings her hands to run through her hair.</em> </p><p>  <em>God, she didn’t know she had that in her.</em> </p><p>  <em>Oh, God, why did she do that?</em> </p><p>With Angie roiling in the aftermath of her actions on the fire escape, Peggy must sort out her own feelings. Among other things, there's a trained assassin on the loose, Miriam Fry is out to get Peggy, and Daniel Sousa won't stop asking her out on dates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1

The moment Angie gets back into her own room, heart pounding like a drum in her rib cage, she deadbolts the door and brings her hands to run through her hair. 

God, she didn’t know she had that in her. 

Oh, God, why did she do that? 

With a persistent headache still rattling her head, she walks into the bathroom with a cup to get herself water. It won’t rid her of the hangover, but it can’t hurt. Besides, she thinks as she wipes a bit of Peggy’s lipstick from the corner of her lip, she needs a moment to think. 

She hadn’t really planned on kissing Peggy, or if she had, she hadn’t planned to do it on the lips. It was a spur of the moment thing, a spur of the you-have-arms-like-a-god moment combined with a little bit of morning awe sitting on the fire escape. Now, though… now she’s not so sure it was the best idea. 

First off, she might still be a little drunk. Was she really head-over-heels for Peggy or was it just the alcohol talking? Second, the fact that Peggy might not even be interested in a lady like her, or ladies at all, had never crossed her mind. There was just this pull, this insistent voice in her mind telling her that somehow, she needed to kiss Peggy. 

Oh, God, oh, God, oh _God_. Did she just ruin her friendship with Peggy Carter? 

Angie lets out a low groan and brings her water back into the living space, taking a seat at her vanity and popping two more aspirin. She needs to eat something soon, or the aspirin aren’t going to be too friendly on her empty, churning stomach. 

She looks into the mirror and sees a smudge of red on the corner of her lips where she’d clearly missed wiping it off before. She uses a tissue this time, dabbing at the stain until her lips are clean. Her face is tired, bags under her eyes and hair half in curls, half not, and her lips won’t curl up into a smile no matter how hard she tries. It’s something she does when she’s upset, something someone once told her makes you feel better. Fake a smile until a real one appears. 

Peggy Carter is on the other side of her wall and she kissed her and now Angie can’t ever speak to Peggy Carter again. 

Maybe she’s being too dramatic. (Buzz off to her drama coach who says otherwise, she’s damned good at being dramatic.) Maybe Peggy is waiting outside her door, too nervous to knock. Maybe Peggy is violets, and maybe Angie didn’t just make one of the biggest mistakes of her entire life. 

She stands up, putting the water on a coaster and walking to the eyehole in the door. She glances out, spotting an empty hallway and no Peggy. 

She feels like crying, and, being ever so dramatic, does so. Tears come out in big ugly streams, her face screwing up like it always does. She clenches at the fabric of her dress, wrinkled and covered in dirt stains from sleeping atop the fire escape. She goes back to the vanity and sits, taking slow sips of her water and wiping the tears away. Her makeup is already gone from the night so it doesn’t stream down her face with the tears, but she’s blotchy nonetheless. She always gets blotchy, red spots adorning her cheeks and eyes turning puffy and bloodshot. She’ll stay that way for an hour or so, eliciting sympathy from those around her. 

Angie didn’t planned for this. She thought she could stop having these sorts of feelings for other girls, stop that moment when friendship suddenly tilted into something more. 

She had promised Father Marco this would never happen again. 

She had promised her parents. 

Now the taste of Peggy’s lipstick is lingering on her tongue all the hail Marys in the world can’t take that sin away. 

Angie wipes away the last of her tears with her sleeve, leaving a black streak across the fabric from the remaining mascara on her lashes. Finishing the rest of the water, she rinses the glass out a places it back on her bedside table. Rain has begun to fall outside and the droplets collect on the glass of her window. She walks out and looks onto the fire escape below, water making the metal glisten against the dim light in the sky. She can still feel the crick in her back from leaning up against the railing the night before. She vaguely remembers the softness of Peggy’s hair against her cheek in between bouts of fitful sleep. She moves away from the window. 

She is a big girl, and she can take care of herself. This is nothing she can’t brush off and get over, just like last time. Maybe she can even look Peggy in the eye and ask for forgiveness and maybe another shot at being friends. 

At the thought, another sob catches in her throat and she lifts her hand to muffle it. She quickly composes herself and goes to the bathroom to jump in the shower. She runs the water colder than she usually likes, icy droplets against her skin, but it does the trick. Her heartbeat slows down and the hotness prickling under her skin disappears. She scrubs herself clean of makeup, of the booze, of the smell of cigarette smoke and the persistent scent of Peggy Carter. 

When she finally towels off, Angie pins up her hair, redresses, and reapplies her makeup. When she looks at herself in the mirror, she can’t even see the red on her cheeks anymore. She dabs at her eyes one more time and sucks in a deep breath, looking herself over. Even Mrs. Fry wouldn’t know what she was up to the night before. 

Angie Martinelli, actress extraordinaire, can pull off a show when she needs to. 

She’s ready to open the door to her apartment, but when she puts her hand on the doorknob, it won’t move. It trembles as she stands still, her stomach beginning to churn again. She closes her eyes and takes in a deep breath, but even then she can’t go through the door. The image of Peggy outside, Peggy frowning at her and never speaking to her again, Peggy whispering to the other girls about her, being disgusted by her… Angie squeezes her eyes shut harder and still can’t move. 

She lets go of the doorknob and takes a step back. 

She can’t see Peggy again. She messed up, she messed up real bad, and now Peggy’s one more casualty in her stupid life because of what’s wrong with her. She was trying so hard to fix it but Peggy Carter came into her life like a breath of fresh air and sent all of her hard work to hell and back. 

She looks out the eyehole and sees the hallway is empty. Hand still trembling, she opens the door and steps out, moving quickly down the hall. 

Maybe somewhere in her mind she thought Peggy was the one she could reach out to, find someone to confide in and find comfort with. It was this pull, like a magnet. She had been so stupid. 

Angie nearly glances back before she turns the corner. 

\-- 

Peggy stops crying quickly after she starts. She looks at the window and watches the rain come down hard, thinking how apt and cliché the weather is. She’s over the shock of it, being kissed by Angie in the hallway after a rather intimate night on the fire escape. Now her mind is blank, her eyes focused on the ceiling in her room. She still sits against the wall next to the window, one hand in her lap and one hand trailing through her hair. (Damp, greasy, and smelling like a bar.) 

It’s nothing she’s ever had to deal with before. 

Her heart feels like someone’s pumped helium into it, swelling her chest and making her head dizzy. She doesn’t like the feeling, surprise mixed with confusion mixed with something else she can’t put a finger on. 

After a minute or two of deep breathing, she manages to get herself together enough to stand up and wipe her face clean of makeup in the bathroom. Peggy doesn’t spare a second glance of herself in the mirror- she’s started mornings in much worse states than her current one. There are no bruises to be covered in foundation, no seeping cuts across her cheek to clean, and none of her teeth have been knocked about. She’d stopped using a mirror for anything other than practicality years ago. 

The only thing that needs to be fixed are her nerves. 

Peggy returns to the main room and opens her dresser, sifting through her clothes until she finds something plain and comfortable to face the day in. Unless she receives an urgent call from the office or Mr. Jarvis throws rocks at her window, she won’t be going to work today. Instead, she busies herself with laying her clothes on the bed and then running a  shower. Her arm is still awfully sore and her back stiff from its sleeping position the night before. Hot water to loosen her muscles and sooth her racing mind would only make sense, she thinks. 

She thinks about Angie, how frightened she’d looked before escaping into her apartment, the feel of her lips, chapped and stale, the way she’d pulled back immediately. 

Peggy wants to be upset with Angie, wants to be taken aback by the move. She tries to think back to the events leading up to it, her mind dulled by the alcohol and memory fuzzy of the night before. All she keeps coming back to is Angie pressed at her side in the bar, Angie hanging off her arm, Angie up against her on the fire escape. A strange warmth blossoms in her chest at the thought. 

Peggy wants to be upset but she can’t be, not at Angie. Peggy is confused, perhaps a little taken aback by the spontaneous show of affection, but not upset. 

She wonders if anyone else knows that Angie’s queer, wonders if Angie has told anyone. Peggy Carter is no prude, and she’s no bigot and after her years in the army she’s walked in on enough to know when to keep her mouth shut. She’s seen enough to know that people love each other in uncountable ways, and fear and violence keep them from expressing it in the open. What people do is none of her business, and she’s never had a reason to hate anyone for it. 

She’s never really considered herself a part of it, either. There have been women she’s admired, women she wanted to be close to, but none that she wanted to spontaneously kiss in a hallway. Did she do something that led Angie to believe…? 

She considers knocking on Angie’s door after the shower, confronting her about it. Peggy doesn’t like things being left in the open with no explanation. Leaving things open-ended makes her nervous and anxious and there hasn’t ever been a case she’s left undone. 

Yes, she’ll wait until after the shower. And so she does. 

The hot water comes out weak, a sign that she’s showering much too late in the day. It’s past breakfast, she knows, and most of the women in the Griffith shower right before coming down. She takes what she can get, quickly rinsing off the stench of the bar and the sweat that had gathered in the crevices of her body. 

They’d had a wonderful romp. Peggy can’t remember the last time she’d had so much fun, abandoning reservations about going out with someone, not worrying about them getting assassinated during the night. It was a rare occurrence for her to let go, and Angie had been alongside her the whole time. 

The water is far too cold now, so Peggy shuts it off and reaching blindly outside for the towel. She wraps herself up, pats herself down, and moves the towel to her head. She walks into the main room of her apartment, lifting the clothes off the bed. White blouse, blue wool skirt, green sweater. Gentle colors, nothing too showy, nothing too startling. She realizes deep down she doesn’t want to scare Angie at all, doesn’t want to make her feel guilty or upset. 

Angie is like a beacon of shining light over the Griffith and the idea of doing anything to change that makes Peggy feel sick. 

She pulls her hair up into a bun, which will have to do because she certainly didn’t put it into pincurls the night before. Wet strands of hair stick to her neck and she does her best to pull them out of her collar, hoping they’ll behave. She looks for a clean pairing of stockings, finding only one half of the pair and digging through a pile of dirty clothes before plucking another out. Peggy briefly considers going without, sniffs the stocking, and decides it’ll have to do. 

With the garters clipped into place, she turns around in the mirror and decides she looks as unintimidating as she could possibly be. 

And so she opens her door and enters the hallway, sliding over one room and standing in front of Angie’s apartment. The room number glimmers in the hall lights, and there’s a dent near the door handle that Peggy’s never noticed before. She can’t hear anything on the other side, no sign of movement or water running. She presses her ear against the door, careful not to make a sound. Nothing. 

It’s unusual for Angie to not make a sound. She's usually singing, dancing around her room, humming a jingle under her breath. The silence takes her by surprise. 

Peggy removes her ear and takes a deep breath, knocking briskly with the back of her hand. Her heart thumps against her chest, making her feel silly. _You’re not knocking on Death’s door, Margaret._

There’s no answer. She tries again, listening for signs of someone inside the apartment. She briefly considers scaling the windows on the outside of the building to see if Angie is just hiding. 

“Morning, Peggy!” 

Peggy’s hand flies away from the door and she turns to see Dottie Underwood emerging from her room at the end of the hallway. 

“Oh, good morning, Dottie.” 

“I’m peachy. Didn’t see you at breakfast this morning, though. You alright?” Dottie clicks her lock shut and pockets the key. 

Peggy takes a step back from Angie’s door, turning to face Dottie. “No, I’m afraid I was feeling rather ill this morning. Stomach flu, perhaps.” 

“Hope you’re feeling better now. You looking for Angie?” 

“Actually, yes, I borrowed a book of hers and wanted to return it to her.” 

Dottie fixes a piece of hair that had fallen over her face, pinning it back to the side of her head. “I think I saw Angie leaving when I came up here earlier. Don’t remember seeing her at breakfast, either.” 

Peggy’s heart sinks, disappointment settling in her stomach. She had be reared up, ready to go, and now Angie has disappeared. 

“Oh, really? She said she’d be heading down after she gave me the book.” 

Dottie cocks her head, looking thoughtful. “Maybe she slipped by without me noticing.” 

Peggy shrugs her shoulders. “I suppose I’ll have to wait to catch her, then.” 

Dottie gives her a bright smile, already on her way down the hallway. “Good luck, Peggy! I’ll let her know if I see her.” 

“Thank you,” Peggy returns, lifting a hand in goodbye. Once Dottie’s footsteps have disappeared, she turns back to her own door. Her room seems quieter than before, all the nervous energy lifted and only a heavy stillness remaining. Peggy lets down her hair, the damp strands falling against her shoulders. She sits down on the edge of her bed, wondering where Angie had gone, what she was doing right then, whether she ran away on purpose.  
  
Peggy lays back, eyes fixed on the ceiling, mind churning away and getting nowhere.


	2. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A huuuuge thanks to [sarah_dude](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sarah_dude/) and [cassiopeiasara](http://archiveofourown.org/users/cassiopeiasara/) for beta'ing and giving me awesome suggestions. You guys rock!
> 
> This chapter takes bits of canon from episode 5 (The Iron Ceiling) and then veers off in a completely different direction. :)

It’s funny how you can come back to a place you’ve been a thousand times before and feel like it’s completely different. Or maybe the place is the same and she’s changed a thousand times over.

Angie’s feet dangle over the edge of the old dock, her legs resting against the weathered wood. She inhales, sucking in the salt smoke air into her lungs. The harbor is near her childhood home, tucked behind the old remains of two factories that have since shut down, with the war being over and all. The water is a murky bluish grey, and she recalls her brother getting thrown into it once by their cousin during a heated debate about baseball. Her ma has gone on and on about what a fool Tony was for getting himself in all sorts of trouble.

The place is exactly the same but Angie feels like she’s carried all of her thoughts heavy on her shoulders, keeping her from being present.

Her fingers trace the edges of a small notebook she’d picked up on a whim once when visiting Coney Island. There’s a pen in her pocket she nicked from work. She doesn’t draw much, and she’s not anything special, but sometimes pulling the ink across the paper calms her nerves.

A boat churns the water near her, sending little waves to lap against the dock, gently rocking it back and forth. Angie pulls her bare feet up, careful to keep them dry. She takes the pen from her pocket.

The pages are filled with crude sketches: obscured faces from the diner, men with their mouths open comically wide; New York streets with buses and cabs formed from haphazard strokes of black; the last page, a smudge of charcoal she’d drawn to and fro until the Manhattan skyline appeared on the page.

She flips to a clean page and holds the pen between her lip and nose. She stares for a few moments, brows knit together in thought. There are so many thoughts swirling in her mind, but she finally takes the pen between her fingers and begins.

The first lines come together and start to form a boat, then the small ripples of the water around her, and the dock, half-broken, that juts into the bay. More boats pass by Angie as her hand moves in smalls arcs and quick bursts of ink. The sun crests across the tops of the buildings next to her before sinking in a hazy glow behind them, throwing rough shadows into the water that shake whenever a vessel moves through the harbor.

At last, Angie slips the pen behind her ear. The bay sits before her in the notebook, the brick walls of the buildings flanking the edges of the bay, a diesel ship chugging through the water. She frowns, slipping the pen from her ear and adding a small figure to the end of the dock, legs hanging over the edge. She lets out a deep breath and flips the notebook shut.

The dock stirs under Angie as she walks back to the road. She slips on her shoes near the end, knocking them once to get the rocks out. Gulls swoop down from the foggy air to perch on the dock, nosing around for any scraps left behind. The fog thins the more inland she goes.

It hasn’t changed at all.

-

Angie raps three times on the immaculately painted red door. No matter how little money her ma had in the bank, the front door to the apartment always looked well-polished. She hears a rumble of noises, the telltale sign that more than one person is making a beeline down the rickety stairs. The door is thrown open a moment later, the tall frame of Tony filling the space in front of her. Right behind him is Angie’s ma herself, all limbs, with her hair wrapped up into a tight bun.

“Angie!” Tony exclaims, taking a step back to let her in, pushing her ma back into the entryway. He yelps when she whacks him out of the way.

“Angela!” Her ma looks her up and down, frowning at the small handbag. “You’re early.”

She’s referring to the fact that Angie usually visits the first Sunday of every month and it is, in fact, Saturday evening. Angie would have waited, but the idea of spending the night in her room alone made her feel sick, so she threw together a bag and took the first train she could catch to Brooklyn.

She looks between her brother and ma, hands tightening around the bag and mind trying to come up with something to say. Instead, her traitorous body shivers, and she steps forward to bury her head in her ma’s shoulder. She feels a hand come up to rub up and down her back, and hears her ma telling Tony to go up and heat water for tea. His heavy feet are on the stairs a second later.

Angie sniffs, feeling pathetic and childlike when her ma steps back to look at her again.

“Ay, bella, what happened?”

Angie bites her lip and falls back into her ma’s embrace, a name stuck in her throat and her heart aching in her chest.

-

Her old room is at the top of the building in the attic, taken over by her younger sister Catalina after Angie had moved out. Cat in turn had packed her bags and moved out to marry a man from New Jersey when she turned eighteen. He wasn’t even Catholic and Ma had almost died when she heard they’d gotten hitched. Pa had been angry too, but in the quiet way he always is. He never said anything, but the way the vein in his forehead pulsed when it came up was enough to know how he felt. Cat wrote letters almost every weekend, but it was only last Christmas that she was finally allowed to come home.

The room had been mostly empty for two years, Tony sleeping in the room he’d shared with Vinny (before Vinny had gone to college in New Jersey) and her parents together in the other bedroom on the floor below. The sheets are the same as always, a gold and blue quilt her nonna made, laying over a crème-colored bedspread. There are rips in the fabric she doesn’t remember being there the last time she’d slept over (had it been Christmas the year before?), and what looks like a coffee stain on the pillow.

Neither her ma nor Tony had asked for any specifics yet, evidently content to let Angie silently loom over her tea and not say a word. It’s unlike her ma and Angie supposes she really must have looked a sight to fend off even the most pressing questions.

Her overnight bag sits by the edge of the bed, nothing more than a nightdress and change of clothes. She’d forgotten to pack a toothbrush, but realized soon after leaving the Griffith there’s sure to be another one somewhere in the apartment. If there’s nothing else the Martinellis are good at, they’re damn good hosts.

A small knock at the door pulls Angie from her thoughts.

“Come in.”

The door creaks, it always has, and the hunched over frame of her pa lumbers into the room. He’d always been too tall for the doorway, and his greying hair bristles as it brushes the frame.

Angie’s heart swells, if only for a moment. Her pa usually works the night watch on Sundays, meaning she only gets to see him for an hour or so when she arrives before he has to leave. He comes to the bed and leans over, and she lets herself be pulled into the hug. His beard tickles her forehead. He smells like cherry tobacco, musky and sweet like the smoke that comes out of the pipe his own father had whittled. It makes her feel easy for a moment. She’s out of tears, wrung out by the last day, so she simply rests against him.

“Your ma told me someone broke my Passerotta’s heart.”

Angie smiles at her ma’s dramatics. She hasn’t said a word about anything yet, but a mother’s intuition always knows.

“It’s my fault, mostly,” she murmurs. She stares at her bare feet, flexing her toes and avoiding her father’s gaze.

He doesn’t say anything in response, just moves next to her and puts an arm around her shoulder. They stay like that for a few moments, silence sitting comfortably between them.

“What are you going to do?”

The questions takes Angie by surprise. She looks over at her pa now, and she see the crow’s feet coming from the edge of his eyes like tiny rivers.

“Move on, I guess.” She feels a familiar tug in her chest, like her ribcage is squeezing itself shut. She tries to take a deep breath, but it comes in shallow.

“You can stay as long as you need to. Your ma and I always have the door open.”

Angie nudges her pa’s side. “You know I got work on Monday.”

He chuckles, low and rich. “That doesn’t stop us from trying to get you home, Passerotta. The house is so empty now that you all moved away.”

“You’ve still got Tony.”

“Yes, but it is different than having all four of you.”

Angie hums instead of responding, closing her eyes. It’s easier here, away from the diner, from the Griffith, from Peggy. Here’s, she’s just little Angela who had an indiscretion once that would be forgotten, little Angela who still cries when she hugs her ma and punches her kid brother when he gives her crap for it.

“Your ma is making you eggplant parmesan.”

As if on cue, Angie’s stomach grumbles. She hasn’t eaten since picking up a scone in the morning on her way to the train station.

“Bless her soul,” she sighs, and her pa ruffles her hair. She pretends to make a fuss, but he sees right through her.

“There’s my Angela,” he says.

She smiles, a real smile this time, and not one that hurts to put on. It feels good, like one little stitch over the open wound inside of her.

She follows her pa down the narrow steps from the attic. Before they get to the kitchen she can hear her ma lecturing Tony on getting out the good silverware. The smells begin to waft around her, and if just for the night, she can be little Angela, fourteen and bright-eyed and ready to down at least two plates of dinner.

It hasn’t changed at all.

-

Angie’s more full than she’s been in months, stomach tight against the waistline of her dress. The Griffith buffets got nothing on her ma’s cooking, and she finally relents and changes into her nightdress. It’s only nine o’clock, but her eyelids are heavy and her limbs feel like lead. The last 24 hours have sucked the life right out of her, and although she got to spend dinner catching up with her family and speaking about everything but the reason she’s at home, there was only so much chatter she could take.

She hears her ma’s footsteps coming up the stairs, a patter barely audible if not for years of hearing it. She knows it was only a matter of time before they were alone together. Angie contemplates pretending to be asleep, avoiding the conversation altogether, but she instead braces herself with a pillow tugged braced against her chest with her knees.

Her door opens slowly, her ma’s head poking in. She’s put her hair out of a bun and up into pincurls, something Angie couldn’t find the energy to do even if she wanted.

“How are you?” Her ma’s accent is thick, but her English is impeccable, something she always waves off but Angie knows it came from hours and hours of hard work. Growing up, she was always embarrassed when her ma would stumble over words, correcting her indignantly. She’d been young and impatient, less understanding of the work it took to learn a whole new language.

“Alright. Tired.” Her ma sits down right next to her, putting a hand on her knee.

“Your pa’s worried about you.”

“Isn’t he always?”

Her ma brushes a piece of hair off her face.

“Our little Angela comes home in tears a day early and then barely talks at dinner. You see why he’s worried.”

Angie feels a creeping sense of guilt gnawing at the edge of her mind.

Peggy’s name is still on the tip of her tongue, itching to be spat out. She wants to curl up in her ma’s lap, explain everything- the way Peggy’s laugh always makes her heart skip a beat, Peggy’s biting sense of humor that can knock a man sideways, the way she can lift Angie straight up onto a fire escape with those arms of hers.

“I’m sorry,” is what Angie says instead. She squeezes the pillow tighter against her chest.

“Is this about _una ragazza_?” Her ma’s voice is suddenly tense, like it hurt to get the words out.

Angie knows the question was coming the moment she showed up a day early and fell crying into her ma’s arms. It’s almost a relief to hear it out in the open.

“No, of course not,” she lies. She’d gotten so good at pushing this part of her away, pretending it doesn’t exist, that the lie slips out easily. Her skin begins to prickle, and she pulls the covers up around her.

Her ma doesn’t say anything for a moment, and Angie feels her blood run cold. Finally, she speaks.

“Good girl,” she says, making Angie’s stomach twist into knots. “But I still don’t like seeing you so upset.” Her ma gets up and kisses the top of her head.

“Get some sleep, Bella. We can talk if you want tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Ma. G’night.”

When the door clicks shut, Angie flips the light switch off, encasing the room in darkness save for the flow coming from the single window along the slanted ceiling.

The bit of peace she felt earlier has evaporated, consumed by the familiar self-loathing following her for the last day. As she squeezes her eyes shut and wills sleep to overcome her, the feeling grows until she feels sick.

She’s fifteen and open raw, shame covering her like a cloak. Her parents are speaking in quick Italian in the room over. She hear ma begin to cry. She puts her hands over her ears, fear spreading through her veins and making her hands quake.

It hasn’t changed at all.

 

**************************************************************************************

 

“I know you spent time in Russia, but we’re putting together a European tac team that knows the terrain.” Dooley keeps his gaze away from hers.

“Not like I do. Not like the 107th regiment,” Peggy says, keeping her voice even.

“Not even Europeans know Europe as well as the 107th. You think I wouldn’t snatch them up if I could?”

Her mind is traveling a mile a minute.

“What would you say if I could deliver them?”

“I’d say pack your bags, but that’s not going to happen.”

This is not entirely how Peggy had planned spending her Sunday afternoon. She’d received the call briefly after grabbing a bite at the L&L, foolishly wondering if Angie might be there. Sousa had been on the other end of the line, babbling on about typewriter that typed by itself in code.

So, here she is, arguing with a pitiful, whiny Thompson over whether she’s qualified to be dropped into Russia (she, who spent months _in Russia_ during the war) and convincing Dooley she’s not going to get the whole team killed. (Again, _months_ in Russia.)

She has them now, though, with the phone to her ear and her hand spinning the numbers to make an international call to Poland. It’s only a matter of confirming what coordinates they’ll meet at and a quick briefing of the mission. Dugan’s voice is a breath of fresh air, one of the few males she can actually stand to talk to nowadays. They finally agree on a rendezvous point and a code word before she hangs up.

In a matter of minutes, she’d gotten herself a ride straight into Leviathan’s base.

The look on Thompson’s face is almost worth the pain of having him come alone on the trip.

-

The thing about long plane rides, especially long plane rides with people you’d rather toss out the side door then talk to, is you have a lot of time to think.

Instead of thinking about the fact that they’re plummeting headfirst into what she knows is a Leviathan trap and trying to come up with some plan to get them all out alive, Peggy’s brain is stuck back in the third floor hallway of the Griffith.

Peggy is thinking an awful lot about that _kiss_ \- to be precise, she’s thinking an awful lot about whether she minded that kiss at all. And that sends her mind into some sort of crisis regarding whether or not that might mean she likes Angie enough to like that kiss and so far it’s only given her a slight headache.

Angie is rather endearing, and funny, and her smile is rather adorable. Peggy hasn’t let someone get under her skin like this in ages, not since…

Therein lies the biggest roadblock. Steve’s blood is still tucked away in her apartment wall where she’d hidden it. She hasn’t looked at it since hiding it away, but she can always feel its presence every time she’s in her room. She’d gotten so good at making herself forget about him, pushing every single lingering smile out of her mind, but now there is a reminder, something constant to keep picking at the scab over her heart.

“Hey, Carter, you hear what Thompson just said?”

Peggy looks up from here she’d been staring at nothing on the floor, hands rubbing together to keep warm. She notices two things at once: her leg is terribly asleep and sending little pinpricks from her ankle to her hip, and her team is all silent and staring at her.

“I apologize,” she starts, sitting up a little straighter and trying to subtly shake her leg awake. “I got a bit caught up in my own thoughts.”

“Better not let that become a habit.” It’s Thompson who says it, of course. “We’ve got a tight schedule and a team to meet up with. We’re two hours from drop, so let’s go over the procedure again.”

Peggy’s mind is forced from thoughts of Angie’s lips and the remains of Steve hidden in her room as Thompson begins another speech about the importance of listening to orders.

It’s not as if he knows the Howling Commandos in the slightest, or anything about storming a Russian terrorist organization. He’ll find out quickly, though, Peggy thinks as she sits back, focusing on a rivet in the ceiling as she pretends to listen. Dugan and the others don’t take well to orders from strange men.

-

Peggy is half-worried for and half-amused at Thompson as she readies himself for the plane jump. He looks like he’s about to crack his hands from how much he’s worrying them together, and she ends up feeling just pity.

“Relax. You’ll break something.”

Thompson looks up, and she can see how pale he is even in the dim light around them.

“You a mind reader, or is that just your women’s intuition speaking?”

She’s surprised she hasn’t clocked him yet. Instead of doing so, she finds the pity outweighs the disdain.

“How’s this for women’s intuition- this is your first jump, isn’t it?”

He actually looks taken aback, and she just lowers her head and smiles.

“Ninth.” Thompson still fiddles with his hands. A pause, and then, “Eight training jumps.”

It’s a miracle, really, that he is the first to jump out of the plane. As the lead of the team, he is, in theory, supposed to be the first to go, but Peggy thinks he might faint before making it to the open side hatch. She watches him disappear into the gaping darkness below, counts to three, and leaps.

There are few things quite as exhilarating as leaping from a plane into the night air.

_What about hoisting a drunken women onto your shoulders to reach a fire escape, then scaling an “impenetrable” building in high heels?_

Honestly, of all the places her mind could go while gliding through the bitter cold with only a parachute keeping her from imminent death.

-

It’s a strange sense of nostalgia to be reunited with her team after so many months of seeing nothing of them. Her mood lifts, her smiles come more easily, and she banters with her boys as if the war is still on and Steve is only off around the corner to scout out a place to camp.

There is, of course, something missing from their group that is only more obvious when Peggy finds herself situated in the back of the truck with Dugan and a bottle of bourbon.

“Yeah, I miss him, too,” Dugan says after a tense silence in which Peggy has to close her eyes and fend off a barrage of memories that haven’t haunted her in years. It’s being back on European soil with the Howling Commandos, holding a machine gun across her lap, the smell of gunpowder and oil thick around her. She hates it and loves it and has no idea what to say.

Instead, her mind wanders once again back to New York, trying to push away thoughts of a ghost. He haunts her even there, a scrawny young man struggling to do one push up slipping in and out of her mind. But it’s better when her mind is in New York. There isn’t death there like there is here, fresh in the air like bullets are still raining down like confetti.

New York is full of life and celebration, and new work, and new friends, and Angie.

Her mind flickers from Steve’s face to Angie’s, and it’s startles her enough for Dugan to notice.

“You alright, Pegs?”

Peggy knows this isn’t the time to be this distraught, not when she has to be on her highest alert and direct a team through a potentially deadly trap. It’s just that the last 24 hours have been rather trying and she’s been thrown back into the field with a group of people she’s only ever associated with Steve. It’s enough to send her usually collected self into a flurry of emotional distress.

She finds her voice after a few seconds. “Did you lose anyone, during the war?” She speaks almost in a whisper.

Dugan looks at her like she’s grown a second head, and she realizes she’s given him no context. She finds herself letting out a quiet laugh.

“I mean someone you were…” Peggy struggles to find the word. “Someone very special to you.”

In all their time together, Peggy learned very little about the Commandos personal lives before the war. She knew Dugan had been a rather infamous horseshoe player, and that Pinky had been nearly been put in jail for stealing from grocery stores to feed the children of tenants that lived below him. Gabe could play the fiddle, and they had witnessed it after going into a town where a local man had let him borrow the instrument. Monty didn’t actually fancy tea, preferring coffee, and Morita hated guns and held by that the entire time the war had been on.

Yet she’d had no idea if any of them had someone back home. It wasn’t something they shared much, maybe because it was easier to pretend home didn’t exist. It made missing someone hurt less, made jumping in front of a bullet seem less like something that would have consequences beyond poor impulse control and heroic stupidity.

“No.”

Peggy feels herself deflate at Dugan’s answer, all of the questions bubbling inside of her extinguished.

“I tried not to get too close to anyone after I knew I’d be enlisting, and I was lucky no one came along. There was a very pretty girl in France, though.”

Peggy jams her elbow into his side, remembering the exact night he’s referring to. It had involved far too much bourbon and a dance on top of the bar with a local girl who didn’t speak a lick of English to pair with Dugan’s inability to speak a word of French.

“Jeez, you don’t have to go full Lieutenant Carter on me. We haven’t even spent a day together yet.”

“Quiet, you. You never know how to take a conversation seriously.”

Dugan chuckles, his laughter trailing off when he realizes Peggy is just staring at the opposite side of the truck wall.

“I think Sam did, though.”

At first, Peggy thinks Dugan means Sam can take a conversation seriously. (Which, to be fair, is usually the case.) Then it dawns at her what he really means.

“He’s never mentioned it.”

“Yeah, well, most of us didn’t.” Dugan looks away from Peggy now. “He talked about it when we were all caged up in that Hydra base.”

They had spoken of the daring rescue by Steve, but never much of their time captured. It hadn’t seemed as important then. What mattered was they escaped.

“Thank you, Dugan,” Peggy says, and they fall into an easy silence.

The questions well up again inside of her, swirling around on the tip of her tongue.

_How do you move on?  
_

_How do you love again?_

_-_

That night at the campfire, she lets herself be loose and easy, swallowing enough of whatever cheap Russian liquor they have to feel some of the weight lift off her shoulders. Even Thompson pulls the stick out of his ass, if only for the night. They trade stories, laugh about old jokes and new ones.

When the embers start to glow in the fire pit, most of the team calls it a night, snuffing out their cigarettes and tossing empty bottles into the woods. Goodnights are mumbled, and they raucous from earlier settles into the easy hum of the trees in the wind and the occasional crackle from the fire.

Peggy remains, staring at the embers, mind awash with the plans for the morning. She hasn’t been back in the field since the war, and she knows she’s rusty. She should have a better plan by now, something solid in case all goes wrong with the team. She needs to find evidence of Howard being set up, find _something_ that will get the SSR off his back and get her out of this bloody mess. Then she can get back to the other mess on her hands, Angie.

“Hey.” She looks up to see Sam settle down next to her.

“Hey, yourself.” Peggy picks up a stick and pokes at the embers. A small fire starts again, casting shadows onto Sam’s face. “You should go to bed soon, we have a long day tomorrow.”

“Says the woman who looks like she’s trying to figure out all the answers to the world.”

Peggy laughs. “You know I never sleep before an outing.”

“That doesn’t keep us all from trying to get you to.”

“Never has.”

The weak fire goes out, a final flame licking the coals before disappearing.

“Dugan said you wanted to chat.”

Peggy sighs, knowing Dugan wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. In a way, she’s relieved, and feels her shoulders slump, all of the tension in her neck releasing.

“I’m not gonna make you talk, or anything. We all know how Margaret likes her privacy.” He holds up his hands, no doubt to fend off the little punch on the arm he’s expecting for using her full name. She doesn’t raise her arm, though, sitting up a little straighter instead.

“He mentioned you lost someone during the war.” It feels almost too much to ask, especially from her. She had never talked about Steve once he was gone, choosing to push everything away and give all of her energy and heart to the field. She had to, or the grief would have been too much.

Sam lets out a low whistle. Peggy glances over at him, but it’s hard to see his face in the dim lighting.

“If you’d rather not discuss it-“

“It’s alright.”

Peggy finds herself feeling rather skittish all of a sudden. Sam must sense the way she tenses because he puts a hand on one her shoulders and gives a squeeze.

“I got the notice two days after I came to Europe for the first time. The letter was only half-readable because it had rained the day before and no one had bothered putting the mail under a tent.”

“Was she American?”

“Born and raised, met her in high school. We were set to get married after I came home.”

“She wasn’t in the war then.”

“Nope, hated the whole thing.”

“Then how-?” Peggy hates asking, feels like she’s peeling away a layer of Sam she doesn’t have permission to see.

“She was hanged, the day after I shipped out.”

Peggy instantly wishes she hadn’t asked, a sick feeling settling in her stomach.

“I’m so sorry, Sam.” Her voice catches.

“Said she’d been trying to steal from some store down the street, dragged her out that night. Guess they thought they could if I wasn’t there.”

Peggy hears Sam take in a deep breath.

“Hurt like hell not being there. I almost deserted, thought about taking the soonest plane back across the ocean.”

“Why didn’t you?” Her voice drops to a whisper. She pulls her knees against her chest, holding them tightly. Without the fire, the air is bitingly cold.

“Gabe pulled me through, kept an eye on me for the whole week. Made sure I ate properly, washed, got my act together.”

There are so many things Peggy doesn’t know about the men she fought with through the war.

Sam leans back, cracking his back. When he settles back down, he looks at Peggy.

“Figured I wouldn’t be the only one to lose someone during the war.”

“Yes, but not like you did.”

She’s seen so much death, so many people killed who had no right to die. But there is such an injustice in what Sam is saying. They had spent so much time and effort fighting a war to keep the world free, but the war never stopped for some.

“He was a good person, Peggy. You can carry that piece with you as long as you live.”

“How did you do it?” she asks before her walls can go up again. She spits it out, as desperate sounding as she feels it inside. It’s like pulling teeth, wrenching the words from somewhere they’ve been caged for so long. “Never getting to say goodbye.” She takes a deep breath, squeezing her hands together. “Never getting closure.”

“Time,” Sam says, like he knows exactly what she means.

“Time, and a whole lot of support. Fighting helped, kept me distracted. But you just keep moving forward. You can’t just stop your life forever.”

Peggy sucks in a deep breath and feels tears hot against her cheeks. Sam must notice, because he pulls her into her side. She leans into him, head resting on his shoulder. He smells like smoke and liquor, but his hand rubs up and down her arm. It feels nice, calms her nerves and the ache that still clutches at her chest. She’s been stripped raw, vulnerability not something she indulges in often. Like floodgates being opened, everything spills from her.

“I can’t forget him. I’ve tried, but I just can’t get him out of my head.” Especially now, back here, back with all of the smells and sights, Steve is all around her. She feels like she can almost look over and see him laughing across the fire pit. She feels silly now, a blubbering mess while Sam can be so composed next to her. Sam, who has all the more reason to be angry at the world and cry years later.

“You don’t have to forget him.”

“Then how do you move on?” She brings up a dirty sleeve to wipe at her face, but Sam pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and hands it to her. She laughs, a ugly sound mixing with her tear-choked breaths.

“You just gotta realize they’d want you to. You deserve it. Shit, I dunno. You remember him and realize you’re allowed to care about someone else, too. You can’t spend your whole life keeping yourself from being happy.”

Peggy blows her nose ungracefully, wiping the dribble of mucous that had gathered under her nose. She realizes the air has frozen her tears, and they prickle against her skin.

“You say it like it’s easy,” she says with a playful bite, trying to gather back a sliver of her normal banter.

Sam brushes the hair out of her face.

“It hurts like hell, and heck, it might not ever stop hurting. Sometimes it just hits all at once and I want to scream, maybe punch something. Maybe that’ll never stop. But, Peggy Carter, you are the most resilient woman I have ever met. I’ve watched you gun down Nazis and punch out a man twice your size. If what’s up here-“ Sam puts a finger against her head. “-is anywhere near as strong as that, and I think it is, you can do anything.”

“Thank you,” Peggy says, her eyes slipping shut. It feels like she’s been gutted, taken apart piece by piece, then thrown back together. She can sense a headache tingling around her temples. But Sam is still pressed against her side and for one moment, a single, clear moment, she’s okay.

When Sam pulls away, giving her a final shoulder squeeze, the exhaustion sets in.

“About time you said something.” She does hit him this time, but just a gentle slap on the shoulder. He smiles, his teeth catching the glow of the embers. “Now get to bed, Carter. We’ve got some Russian heads to bash in tomorrow.”

She smiles, getting up and stretching her arms above her head. Steve still lingers in her thoughts, and she supposes no matter what happens in the coming years, he always will. Yet, it feels as if some burden has been taken away from her. It feels like hope, perhaps. Still flickering and uncertain, but there underneath the confusion and dull throb of pain.

“Sam?” she asks, as he walks back. He turns.

“Yeah?”

“Have you found anyone, since her?”

Sam shrugs. “Here and there. It’s hard when you’re moving around all the time. Not everyone gets to sit at a desk back in the U.S. like you.”

She throws and handful of snow at him, watching it dissolve into a fine dust before it even hits him.

“Jerk.”

He opens his arms wide. “Anytime for you.” He takes a few steps toward his tent. “You have a good night’s sleep, then.”

She chuckles and turns back to her tent, body aching for the ground and sleep. Steve is at the edge of her mind, but she lets herself think of delicate lips pressed against hers and brown curls tickling her neck. It doesn’t hurt so much this time.

In a fit of impulse, she spins around. Sam is farther away, nearly at his tent. If she’s going to bare all tonight, she is going to _bare all_.

“Her name is Angie,” Peggy says, careful not to raise her voice too much for fear of waking the others. She’s hedging on the inkling that Sam won’t care about the woman part, and she’ll send him through a wall if he does.

She stands still, staring across the small clearing. She can’t see his face from where she is, and he never says a word, but she swears he gives her a thumbs up before disappearing into the tent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "una ragazza" means "girl" in Italian, or so a few websites told me. Please let me know if that doesn't make sense! I'd love to have it be accurate, of course. :)
> 
> As you can see, my updates are far from regular. D: I'll do my best to update from week to week. I do start a full-time job on Tuesday, so that'll make it a little harder, but I love this story and will do my best!

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea how long this'll be, but stay tuned for updates. :)


End file.
